Yes, Yes, You Can Reduce Your Stress and Anxiety
Where your mind goes, energy flows.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this simple idea lately. Surviving this winter during a pandemic has taken effort for our minds not to wander off to cold, dark places. We had to re-direct our focus and energy towards good thoughts and warm, compassionate actions. That doesn’t mean we don’t acknowledge the feelings of stress and anxiety but can counteract those negative thoughts with positive ones like compassion or gratitude. This hasn’t been easy for me since I find lots of joy in the sunshine, summer and physically being with people. While the practice of finding harmony, peace, and acceptance in darkness isn’t easy, keeping the mind positively occupied during hard times can move mountains.
Ancient yogi Pantajali who wrote the Yoga Sutras and teaches us how to flip the script when we have negative thoughts, and instead to establish a positive or growth mindset:
When disturbed by negative thoughts, opposite (positive) ones should be thought of.
The act of replacing negative thoughts is called pratipaksha bhavana.
The sutra acknowledges that as human beings, it’s inevitable to have negative thoughts that may disturb us. It’s the stress caused by the negative thoughts which make a disturbance that’s the problem. If we have negative thoughts that don’t disturb us, there’s no reason to replace them. But for those that do, sutra 2.33 asks us to replace those thoughts that disturb us and find something positive to occupy the mind instead.
Here are three ways to create positive thought patterns:
Fight negativity bias. Your brain is wired to be negative. This negativity bias is how we kept ourselves safe from threats thousands of years ago—but it isn’t useful in modern days and merely causes stress. Neuroscientist Rick Hanson has a great analogy for this strange quality of the mind. "Your brain," he writes in his book Buddha's Brain, "is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones." But neurons that fire together stay together. You can rewire your neural pathways in only seconds. First notice when you’re feeling stressed, overwhelmed or anxious. Next, move your thoughts to something you’re grateful for only for a few seconds. Your home. Your job. Your health. Your family. Your talents and strengths. Your drive. There you go, you’re working on replacing negative thoughts.
Apply the full stop tactic. Ruminating on misfortunes and the perceived wrongs can be like replaying a bad movie over and over again in your mind. What would have happened if I had done this or that? What would happen if I do this or that in the future? This is not to suggest we should not learn from our past mistakes or live consciously and deliberately. But in the cases when the mental chatter doesn’t stop, apply the full stop tactic. Ask yourself the root cause of what you’re feeling—maybe shame, blame or fear--and how to get back in the present moment. Name aloud or quietly four things you see, three things you feel, two things you hear, and one thing you taste to come back to the present moment.
Breathe into your belly, not your chest. About 90% of us breathe in a shallow way in our chest which maintains our bodies to remain in a cyclical state of stress. Our stress or anxiety causes shallow breathing, and our shallow breathing causes stress. This sets off our sympathetic nervous system, part of our autonomic nervous system that primes us for “fight or flight”. To breathe most effectively and activate our parasympathetic nervous system (our natural calming response), our torso needs to be able to move with the breath – not just the upper chest. The belly needs to relax and distend with the contraction of the diaphragm, the ribs need to float, and the back needs to expand with the breath. Read more about this and try a quick 3-minute practice here.